HarmonyOS is introduced on August 9, 2019 at the Huawei Developer Conference
Yesterday, at the first Huawei Developer Conference in Dongguan (HDC.2019), Huawei officially unveiled a new operating system called HarmonyOS. In China, the software will be known as HongmengOS.
HarmonyOS, a microkernel-based distributed operating system can be used for everything, for smartphones, laptops, tablets, wearables, in vehicle systems, smart home devices.
HarmonyOS will be made available later this year for deployment in smart screen products such as TV, smart watches and in-vehicle infotainment systems. In the next years Huawei will look to bring HarmonyOS to more devices, including smartphones.
Initially targeting the Chinese's market, the new operating system will expand later globally to other markets.
According to Mr. Mr. Yu Chengdong, CEO of the Consumer BG, the main characteristics of Harmony OS are the following:
- HarmonyOS will be based on a microkernel
- it is completely different from Android and iOS, because of its ability to scale across different kinds of devices
- the operating system can be used across different devices from smartphones to smart speakers and even sensors
- it is part of Huawei’s play in the so-called Internet of Things, which refers to devices connected to the internet
- with HarmonyOS a developer can develop an Apps once, then flexibly deploy the App across a range of different devices
- it will work with smartphones and laptops that have a large amount of memory and power as well as with smaller hardware such as sensors that need lower bandwidth
- with it's faster inter-process communication, HarmonyOS will offer higher performances than QNX or Google's Fuchsia
Huawei said it intends to continue using Android for the time being, but has HarmonyOS as back-up OS if will do not be able to continue to use Android OS in the future. “We will prioritise Android for smartphones, but if we can’t use Android, we will be able to install HarmonyOS quickly,” Yu said.
According to Mr. Yu, the effort to switch from Android to HarmonyOS is about 2 to 3 days.
The new OS will be Open Source, to encourage adoption and attract more developers to make apps for it. This also means that theoretically other device-makers could use the HarmonyOS operating system.
